Hurricane Sandy made landfall along the southern New Jersey coast on the evening of October 29, 2012. As the storm came ashore, it continued to pack strong wings—roughly 85 miles (140 kilometers) per hour. Tide gauges recorded storm-surge heights of 12.4 feet (3.8 meters) at Kings Point, New York.

The Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on the Suomi NPP satellite acquired this image of the storm around 3:35 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time (7:35 Universal Time) on October 30. This image is from the “day-night band” on VIIRS, which detects light wavelengths from green to near-infrared. The full Moon, which exacerbated the height of the storm water surge, lit the tops of the clouds.

Sandy’s clouds stretched from the Atlantic Ocean to Chicago. Clusters of lights gave away the locations of some cities throughout the region; but along the East Coast, clouds obscured the lights, many of which were blacked out due to the storm. On October 30, CNN reported that several million customers in multiple states were without electricity.

References

NASA Earth Observatory image by Jesse Allen, using VIIRS Day-Night Band data from the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (Suomi NPP). Suomi NPP is the result of a partnership between NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Department of Defense. Caption by Michon Scott.